Can't thank you guys enough for sharing. I did previous searches in this forum on the subject of morphine, and I think that if I don't bring it up to the care team, I'm liable to go thru this again when I come up for the neck dissection.

My problem, is that my spouse already considers me a bit nutty in a good way. It's hard to explain that one, but I have a rather wild dark sense of humor and say freaky things even when quite lucid. He's never seen me on this sort of drug before, and I had long since forgotten my experience on it at age 20 when they dosed me good for a month on morphine while in traction for the crushed femur. This whole episode brings up bad memories from my youth that I had long since forgotten.

The problem was communication. Last night(and my kids thought this was a hoot because they consider me somewhat nutty too) we were discussing this over dinner in the restaurant. I explained what I could remember... the night nurse who from my whacked out perspective seemed to be quite bossy and had an attitude problem. When she came in and bitched me out for being on the laptop, I guess I must have figured that they were "all out to get me". Incredibly pain, lack of being able to sleep, and being whacked out of my head didn't help much. When under the influence of that particular class of drugs (I remember I sometimes have bad reactions to demerol too from the old days) I get into the "flight or fight" response. Guess this time I chose "flight" because I sort of hid in the room trying to avoid the nurse that annoyed me so much, got real paranoid yet it still amazes me that I was able to plug in the phone and remember my home number. Fully functional but not in my right brain.

The kids were laughing last night because I was explaining the reason she was bitching me out so much is that everytime I tried to use my keyboard, my IV alarm kept going off. Once again I had a bad IV person, the tubing was clogged, they had to come in and fix me up on the next shift. I was already in so much pain because of the "misses" the IV person did prior to surgery, so in my whacked out state, I'm like "Can't these people get anything fricking right?" Obviously, I had no business being online in the first place in that state of mind, but guess I had been feeling lonely and wanted to reach out to some online buddies in a chatroom. All they can remember after seeing me suddenly pop in is me typing.. "oh oh... NURSE... she's coming to take me away.. ho ho hee heee.... whoops" and then I disappeared. See what I mean? I can only recover memories if someone TELLS me what went on. Hubby remembers in my paranoid delusions going on about the "alarm" and only last night when the kids were enjoying this story figured out that the alarm I was yakking about was the IV pump. Otherwise he thought I was making up stories about pink elephants dancing around. Some of what I said made sense only I had no way of conveying it to any party.

This also reminds me of when I worked in the nursing home in highschool when residents would be so paranoid or crazy they would use their phones to call the rescue squads to come get them. The nurses would eventually order that the phones be removed from their rooms and they'd have no way of contacting even their family.

I'm damn near phobic about loss of control. I'd hate to see me get rared up to do "fight" instead of "flight" Having attended nearly three years of my kids martial arts classes, I'd probably be using Matrix moves if I could. (this cracks me up)

Since I've only been averaging about three hours of sleep a night because of pain issues (hopefully to be resolved tomorrow) I've been having whacky dreams about this last episode this week. Had to tell my husband, because although terrifying to me, they were funny. I was driving around for a pharmacy and dreamt that every single pharmacy in my town was looking for me and got a letter from my medical care team saying "This woman is a NUT, call the authorities to come with the net" Ironically in the dream I was taking my pants off in public and hiding out in a Costco because I got lost on the way to the grocery store that had a pharmacy that I thought might not have gotten a letter about me. This reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where Elaine has a rash and no doctors will treat her because she had the doctors record of "difficult" written in her patient charts and can't find any doctor around who hasn't been notified that she's "difficult"

Boy I sure can empathize with Elaine. Guess that's my fear.... "difficult"

Eh, I should have warned ya guys I'm weird.

Jen